the 18sqkm desert of Lompoul

I should have flown to Ethiopia last Thursday, to start a trip to the Omo Valley and from there by land into Somaliland.  Sadly the British tour company I was going with have panicked about the situation with the rebels, and announced just a few days before departure that they have cancelled the trip.

So I booked a last minute weekend away in northern Senegal, to visit the sand dunes of Lompoul.  Somewhere I'd previously decided was not worth my time and money, but with fewer tourists here right now, and the trip not too pricey, I thought it would be preferable to sitting at home moping about my missed Ethiopia trip.

It was billed as an 'astronomy weekend', as a professor of astronomy was to accompany the group, with his telescopes and a ready-made presentation - not really a selling point for me but once he had taken us through the presentation and pointed out Venus and Jupiter when the clouds parted, I was getting interested - so was sad that the clouds thickened during the course of the evening and we didn't get to see Jupiter, Saturn and the surface of the moon through his telescope.  Nor did I get to see Venus at 6am the next morning, as the downside of sleeping in desert tents is the lack of anywhere to charge your phone, so the battery went dead some three hours before the alarm was supposed to wake me up.

However, I did get to be very touristy and do a short walk around on a camel, and also walked about in the dunes looking at the various animal tracks and watching dung beetles do their thing.

As with many events in Senegal which attract tourists or foreign residents, the other participants were mostly French - and whilst I can converse quite happily in French with the Senegalese (indeed with any French-speaking Africans), I find the accent of the French themselves very hard to understand.  I still somehow finished this weekend with a few new friends, however, and had some interesting conversations.  This included some discussion of the risk to the ecology of this part of Senegal - and the livelihoods of those who work there in the tourist trade - from the imminent exploitation of the mineral zircon which was discovered there a few years ago (this apparently being the fourth largest known source in the world).  What I hadn't known was that the Minister of Mines who signed the deal with a French company to exploit the deposits (in which just 10% of the benefit comes to Senegal) was none other than our current president!